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These things seem to come and go in cycles. In a few years Substack will probably end up just like Medium as they try to "cross the chasm" - Typical VC-funded c

These things seem to come and go in cycles. In a few years Substack will probably end up just like Medium as they try to "cross the chasm" - Typical VC-funded company incentives. There is already a lot of low-quality spam on the platform. You don't need $50-100M in funding and (soon) hundreds of employees to run a simple newsletter site. This only forces the company to over-engineer and push intrusive monetization to make meaningful investor returns. Just like Medium, Quora, etc. These were great simple products, until the pressure to justify their valuation and return money to investors ruined them.

baby 4y ago
^ this. It’s too easy to create your blog, and there isn’t much that you can bring to a writer besides a promise of an audience. I don’t think any of these products will ever win. It’s also sort of uncool to write for these platforms, sort of how uncool wordpress was in its early days.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Thorentis 4y ago
  Writing for Substack isn't uncool. In fact if anything, it is extremely in vogue right now. But I agree with GP that eventually it will go the way of Medium, and a new "cooler" platform will take its place.
  - baby 4y ago
    I don’t know any top blogger who used that platform, so I’m not sure I understand your comment.
    - ifqwz 4y ago
      Top bloggers aren't stupid enough to put their blogs in someone else's platform.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    It's never been cool. It's the professional equivalent of people writing on blogspot or wordpress.com A real company will have the resources to setup a blog on their own domain.
    - blowski 4y ago
      And yet a lot of very wealthy people and companies wrote on Medium.
      - baby 4y ago
        The only reason is SEO
    - post-it 4y ago
      The thing with writing is that the smallest distraction can make you not want to write. Like, sure, I could go and set up a blog right now on my domain, but I'd have to find a blogging service (GitHub pages? I don't necessarily want to fiddle with markup though), log into my domain, potentially fiddle with HTTPS, and after all that I won't want to write my blog post anymore. And after I've written my blog post, I'm not going to fiddle with setting up my own blog because I don't have anything to write anymore. And next time I have something to write, I'm not going to want to fiddle with setting up a blog.
      - baby 4y ago
        Sure, that’s why I recommend everyone to just use wordpress
        post-it 4y ago
        If I'm going to use a free Wordpress host (probably with ads), why not use Substack?
        baby 4y ago
        To me the question is why use substack? Wordpress has been around forever, is free, doesn't have ads, and allows you to do customize everything you'd want.
bdbenton 4y ago
A lot of popular web apps seem to decay in this way. The founding developers create an excellent site, it becomes a huge cash cow, then the organization becomes bloated and more focused on extracting more out of existing value than creating new value or building on the original principles. Medium didn't always have a paywall, and I am thankful to the random users here that post archive links to bypass paywalls, I even installed a browser extension for it thanks to this site. Facebook is starting to lose users for the first time in history, despite a rebranding. This website really doesn't have that issue as far as I can tell, and people seem receptive to promoting your software if it is actually useful. There doesn't appear to be such a heavy censorship of hacker-related material that conflicts with corporate interest, like the aforementioned paywall bypass links. In other words, if it ain't broke don't fix it lol
- aintmeit 4y ago
  And even if it broke, don't (can't) fix it.
- sjckciodjcr 4y ago
  none of the companies mentioned were cash cows. medium and quora barely made any money. In general it’s really hard to monetize blogging.
- robocat 4y ago
  > if it ain't broke don't fix it It is a difficult line, because sometimes you see a website become commercially irrelevant over time because functionality is not added. And I guess some sites need to follow visual trends to maintain customers. Also there are long term changes that can force your hand. Mobile friendly required changes or you would lose those customers. Some usability trends are improvements (and some trends are bad: Apple seems to prefer pretty looks at the expense of usability (Apple used to have a fantastic HIG (human interface guidelines))). https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/components/presentation/scroll-views/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
  - cube00 4y ago
blisterpeanuts 4y ago
Many of Substack’s content creators have paid tiers that bring in substantial revenue. For example, Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald both have thousands of paid subscribers. It seems like the company should just keep cultivating this kind of subscription base, and they’ll get plenty of revenue without resorting to intrusive monetization.
- mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
  I think there is a huge gap between "substantial revenue" and unicorn. I have no doubt that these platform can be great businesses, bringing in tens of millions of revenue or profit per year. But when you take on $100M in investor money you are forced to either go big or go home. And going BIG seems really hard with a newsletter or Medium-like business that has little defensibility. Of course, for the founders this may still end up being a great deal and the right choice, even if the company eventually fails.
eslaught 4y ago
Hm, Substack seems to be monetized differently though. Medium was very much in the freemium camp: you go there to read articles, but if you read too many, you get stuck by the paywall. So on the user side there was this constant friction that was obnoxious. But on the author side, the incentive was to make your content as broad as possible because (if I understand correctly) everything got paid by the view out of one big bucket, a la Spotify. This is horrible for premium content (which almost by definition has a more niche audience) so not much of a surprise that type of content suffers in this model. Substack seems to be more like Shopify: individual authors pick whether to monize, and if so how. This makes it much more viable to make true premium content, in the sense of "a thousand fans". I think this enables is creators who are very good at what they do, because their compensation is directly related to (number of readers times price each reader is willing to pay). In Medium that second term was basically fixed and the only way to increase revenue as an author was to write more click-baity articles. Substack optimizes the other direction. As someone who has interacted with a lot of authors, I think this has a lot of value. On HN it's easy to forget that the vast majority of authors are not technical (and I mean this kindly, but really, really not technical). These are people for whom setting up any sort of a blog at all is challenging. Having a way to directly put up content, and charge for it, and be in control seems like a huge win for authors, and if it's a win for authors I think those authors will bring their audiences along to the platform, and the platform wins.
tonystubblebine 4y ago
I am Medium’s new CEO and was a major publisher there before that. I’m reading a lot of “go the way of Medium” type comments. Completely fair. Medium was going in a good direction and then made a wrong turn. Call it a lesson learned maybe. But there isn’t anything preventing us from reversing back to that decision point and going down the right path. The right path is making sure we surface the good stuff. It’s there. We just made incentive and distribution decisions that swamped a lot of expert level writing with derivative content mill stuff. We like being an open platform and that means plenty of less good stuff. But we have plenty of tools to select the posts that actually provide value. Turning those on is most of my focus. In practice we overlap competitively with all the publishing options. That’s Substack and ConvertKit, Wordpress, Ghost, LinkedIn. Others. The biggest philosophical difference is that I want to hear from people that don’t have time to build an audience. You don’t learn programming, design, marketing or entrepreneurship from a journalist. You want to learn those things from other experts. At least I do. By definition, experts are too busy being experts to be full time writers and audience builders. A person with one great thing to say should be able to show up on Medium with no following and get that thing read by thousands of readers. Nobody has to tell me we aren’t delivering. But I know the system well enough to know we can reverse course. And I know the results so far well enough to know that being useful is enough to overcome our history. So that’s the state of Medium.
- whoooooo123 4y ago
  This is why I read HN: someone starts a discussion about a high-profile tech company, and gets a thoughtful reply from none other than the CEO. Thanks for taking the time.
  - tonystubblebine 4y ago
    I like that too. I’ve been a daily reader here since 2007 and the sharing of 1st hand info is what makes it valuable.
  - eastbound 4y ago
    Ironically, this is also why you use HN and not Medium. The Medium CEO himself has just demonstrated that the discussion happens somewhere else than on Medium.
andrei_says_ 4y ago
It’s almost like we’re doomed to watch platform after platform get corrupted by VC money - starting with the intention to provide a useful service, and inevitably being destroyed by the intention to profit at the cost of all else.

baby 4y ago

^ this. It’s too easy to create your blog, and there isn’t much that you can bring to a writer besides a promise of an audience. I don’t think any of these products will ever win. It’s also sort of uncool to write for these platforms, sort of how uncool wordpress was in its early days.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Thorentis 4y ago
Writing for Substack isn't uncool. In fact if anything, it is extremely in vogue right now. But I agree with GP that eventually it will go the way of Medium, and a new "cooler" platform will take its place.
- baby 4y ago
  I don’t know any top blogger who used that platform, so I’m not sure I understand your comment.
  - ifqwz 4y ago
    Top bloggers aren't stupid enough to put their blogs in someone else's platform.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  It's never been cool. It's the professional equivalent of people writing on blogspot or wordpress.com A real company will have the resources to setup a blog on their own domain.
  - blowski 4y ago
    And yet a lot of very wealthy people and companies wrote on Medium.
    - baby 4y ago
      The only reason is SEO
  - post-it 4y ago
    The thing with writing is that the smallest distraction can make you not want to write. Like, sure, I could go and set up a blog right now on my domain, but I'd have to find a blogging service (GitHub pages? I don't necessarily want to fiddle with markup though), log into my domain, potentially fiddle with HTTPS, and after all that I won't want to write my blog post anymore. And after I've written my blog post, I'm not going to fiddle with setting up my own blog because I don't have anything to write anymore. And next time I have something to write, I'm not going to want to fiddle with setting up a blog.
    - baby 4y ago
      Sure, that’s why I recommend everyone to just use wordpress
      - post-it 4y ago
        If I'm going to use a free Wordpress host (probably with ads), why not use Substack?
        baby 4y ago
        To me the question is why use substack? Wordpress has been around forever, is free, doesn't have ads, and allows you to do customize everything you'd want.

bdbenton 4y ago

A lot of popular web apps seem to decay in this way. The founding developers create an excellent site, it becomes a huge cash cow, then the organization becomes bloated and more focused on extracting more out of existing value than creating new value or building on the original principles. Medium didn't always have a paywall, and I am thankful to the random users here that post archive links to bypass paywalls, I even installed a browser extension for it thanks to this site. Facebook is starting to lose users for the first time in history, despite a rebranding. This website really doesn't have that issue as far as I can tell, and people seem receptive to promoting your software if it is actually useful. There doesn't appear to be such a heavy censorship of hacker-related material that conflicts with corporate interest, like the aforementioned paywall bypass links. In other words, if it ain't broke don't fix it lol

aintmeit 4y ago
And even if it broke, don't (can't) fix it.
sjckciodjcr 4y ago
none of the companies mentioned were cash cows. medium and quora barely made any money. In general it’s really hard to monetize blogging.
robocat 4y ago
> if it ain't broke don't fix it It is a difficult line, because sometimes you see a website become commercially irrelevant over time because functionality is not added. And I guess some sites need to follow visual trends to maintain customers. Also there are long term changes that can force your hand. Mobile friendly required changes or you would lose those customers. Some usability trends are improvements (and some trends are bad: Apple seems to prefer pretty looks at the expense of usability (Apple used to have a fantastic HIG (human interface guidelines))). https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/components/presentation/scroll-views/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
- cube00 4y ago

blisterpeanuts 4y ago

Many of Substack’s content creators have paid tiers that bring in substantial revenue. For example, Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald both have thousands of paid subscribers. It seems like the company should just keep cultivating this kind of subscription base, and they’ll get plenty of revenue without resorting to intrusive monetization.

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
I think there is a huge gap between "substantial revenue" and unicorn. I have no doubt that these platform can be great businesses, bringing in tens of millions of revenue or profit per year. But when you take on $100M in investor money you are forced to either go big or go home. And going BIG seems really hard with a newsletter or Medium-like business that has little defensibility. Of course, for the founders this may still end up being a great deal and the right choice, even if the company eventually fails.

eslaught 4y ago

Hm, Substack seems to be monetized differently though. Medium was very much in the freemium camp: you go there to read articles, but if you read too many, you get stuck by the paywall. So on the user side there was this constant friction that was obnoxious. But on the author side, the incentive was to make your content as broad as possible because (if I understand correctly) everything got paid by the view out of one big bucket, a la Spotify. This is horrible for premium content (which almost by definition has a more niche audience) so not much of a surprise that type of content suffers in this model. Substack seems to be more like Shopify: individual authors pick whether to monize, and if so how. This makes it much more viable to make true premium content, in the sense of "a thousand fans". I think this enables is creators who are very good at what they do, because their compensation is directly related to (number of readers times price each reader is willing to pay). In Medium that second term was basically fixed and the only way to increase revenue as an author was to write more click-baity articles. Substack optimizes the other direction. As someone who has interacted with a lot of authors, I think this has a lot of value. On HN it's easy to forget that the vast majority of authors are not technical (and I mean this kindly, but really, really not technical). These are people for whom setting up any sort of a blog at all is challenging. Having a way to directly put up content, and charge for it, and be in control seems like a huge win for authors, and if it's a win for authors I think those authors will bring their audiences along to the platform, and the platform wins.

tonystubblebine 4y ago

I am Medium’s new CEO and was a major publisher there before that. I’m reading a lot of “go the way of Medium” type comments. Completely fair. Medium was going in a good direction and then made a wrong turn. Call it a lesson learned maybe. But there isn’t anything preventing us from reversing back to that decision point and going down the right path. The right path is making sure we surface the good stuff. It’s there. We just made incentive and distribution decisions that swamped a lot of expert level writing with derivative content mill stuff. We like being an open platform and that means plenty of less good stuff. But we have plenty of tools to select the posts that actually provide value. Turning those on is most of my focus. In practice we overlap competitively with all the publishing options. That’s Substack and ConvertKit, Wordpress, Ghost, LinkedIn. Others. The biggest philosophical difference is that I want to hear from people that don’t have time to build an audience. You don’t learn programming, design, marketing or entrepreneurship from a journalist. You want to learn those things from other experts. At least I do. By definition, experts are too busy being experts to be full time writers and audience builders. A person with one great thing to say should be able to show up on Medium with no following and get that thing read by thousands of readers. Nobody has to tell me we aren’t delivering. But I know the system well enough to know we can reverse course. And I know the results so far well enough to know that being useful is enough to overcome our history. So that’s the state of Medium.

whoooooo123 4y ago
This is why I read HN: someone starts a discussion about a high-profile tech company, and gets a thoughtful reply from none other than the CEO. Thanks for taking the time.
- tonystubblebine 4y ago
  I like that too. I’ve been a daily reader here since 2007 and the sharing of 1st hand info is what makes it valuable.
- eastbound 4y ago
  Ironically, this is also why you use HN and not Medium. The Medium CEO himself has just demonstrated that the discussion happens somewhere else than on Medium.

andrei_says_ 4y ago

It’s almost like we’re doomed to watch platform after platform get corrupted by VC money - starting with the intention to provide a useful service, and inevitably being destroyed by the intention to profit at the cost of all else.